The Critical-Reformist Tension

This chapter begins from and stays with two tensions regarding theorising the state. The first is perhaps the constitutive tension in scholarship on human rights: the understanding of the modern state as both predatory and protective. In his 2013 Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Jack Donnelly observes that ‘the modern state has emerged as both the principal threat to the enjoyment of human rights and the essential institution for their effective implementation and enforcement’. He goes on to place his faith in human rights to prohibit ‘a wide range of state interferences’ and thereby to carve out ‘zones of state exclusion’. In this way, ‘human rights place the people above and in positive control of their government’, a position achieved through ‘extensive rights of political participation’. Donnelly's trajectory moves toward ‘the moral standing of the state’, concluding with ‘paths of incremental change’. His position epitomises what I will call ‘the critical-reformist tension’, which notes and criticises state-caused rights violations before returning to a call for state reform. This first tension is important because many justice-oriented actors feel it today. It leads to conflicting demands for practice. It is carried out in practice when students consider the risk of working as radical artists, activists or community organisers only to go to law school before garnering stable jobs in government or accepting positions at prestigious NGOs.

James Griffin's 2008 On Human Rights typifies a thin version of the critical-reformist tension. Griffin's analysis of human rights violations centres not state violence but relations between rights, such as how a state's enforcement of welfare rights can violate liberty rights. Ultimately, he argues that ‘states are the main agents of security of person’ and that ‘in some states one can vote and enjoy the protection of the police and army without being a citizen, but only citizenship makes their possession secure’. In stressing police protection, Griffin lacks a robust accounting for Indigenous displacement and police violence. His focus on security, which comes at the expense of attending to state predation on made-precarious peoples, recalls A. Dirk Moses’ recent observation that ‘the security imperative can justify permanent occupation, that is, colonial rule’. This point brings me to the second tension.